Rodimus
An AI design journey on college students’ trash disposal habits
Overview
For the Stanford University class CS 247A: Design for Artificial Intelligence, we explored how college students think about trash sorting: what they know, what they misunderstand, and why sustainable intentions do not always turn into sustainable behavior.
The final deliverable was Rodimus, a fictional AI 3D-printing system that recycles and repurposes everyday trash into new objects. Instead of treating waste sorting as a chore, Rodimus imagines disposal as something visible, rewarding, and creatively generative.
Role: Research, concept development, design fiction
Team: Helen He, Caleb Robinson, Romuald Thomas
When: April–May 2023
Research
Students wanted to sort trash correctly but lacked clarity, trust, and motivation.
We began with a diary study, asking Stanford students to document what they threw away and which bins they used: landfill, recycling, compost, or other disposal streams.
A few patterns stood out:
People often wanted to sort correctly, but were unsure where items actually belonged.
Trust mattered. Some participants felt less motivated when they believed recycling would end up in landfill anyway.
Sorting behavior was shaped by more than environmental values: effort, habit, cultural background, and belief in individual impact all played a role.
The core insight was that trash sorting is not only an information problem. It is also a motivation and systems-trust problem.
Above: Groupings of interview findings
Ideation
We explored concepts that made disposal feel rewarding instead of guilt‑driven.
From those findings, we explored concepts that made trash sorting feel more rewarding, visible, or effortless. Ideas ranged from playful feedback systems to self-sorting installations to AI assistants that could guide disposal in real time.
We were most interested in concepts that changed the emotional experience of disposal: instead of making people feel guilty about waste, what if the system helped them see discarded objects as material with future potential?
Above: Brainstormed ideas
Testing ideas
We ran small experiments to see how humor, stakes, and feedback shaped behavior.
To test out how our ideas would perform in the real world, we selected a few of our brainstorm ideas and performed a series of small-scale experiments.
Experiment 1: Trash Talk
A talking trash can that literally talked trash when users sorted waste incorrectly. The concept used playful shame, humor, and immediate feedback to make disposal mistakes harder to ignore.
Experiment 2: Doomsday Clock
A trash-sorting installation framed as a countdown to Earth’s doom. Correct disposal added time to the clock; incorrect disposal took time away, turning everyday sorting decisions into visible environmental stakes.
Final product
Rodimus imagines trash as creative material, not waste.
Rodimus is a fictional AI-powered recycling and 3D-printing system. Users place everyday trash into the machine, and Rodimus identifies, sorts, processes, and repurposes the material into useful new objects.
The final artifact was a design fiction product catalog: part speculative interface, part sustainability provocation, part playful catalog of things trash could become.
